In today's global economy, obtaining a high quality translation of content (e.g. text, graphic design, document layout, etc.) from an original source language to a target language becomes more and more important. While there are many machine, computer based, translation systems, such as Google® Translate, professional human translators are still required in order to produce accurate, high-quality, translation. Unfortunately, human translators often err and produce inadequate translation. The common solution today is to have a proofreader or editor read the translated content and correct it as needed. This solution is expensive, slow and inadequate.
Language translation of textual content is also a complicated process due to a variety of factors, such as syntax, semantics, and language ambiguity that occurs in various aspects in natural language processing, i.e. lexical ambiguity, case ambiguity and referential ambiguity. Therefore, to ensure a high quality of translation, a translator must translate into a language they are fluent in both written and oral form, and they must also have a sufficient knowledge of the field being translated to have a full understanding of the subject matter. It is no wonder then that translations by professional translators can often be of variable quality; and why machine translations are often riddled with errors.
A bad translation can cause significant damage; sometimes even a single word can drastically change the meaning of the entire paragraph. Machine translation solutions are not accurate enough and the existing methods for evaluating translation quality are cumbersome, slow and expensive. Usually a supervising proofreader checks the translation and corrects it if errors are found. A single proofreader may not locate all the errors in the translation especially if s/he is under time pressure.
The level of quality of a given translation is hard to determine as it is a very subjective matter. In essence, a translation is considered to be good if enough people with control of both the source, i.e. original, language and the target language consider it to be an accurate and succinct translation. But, with the existing methods, submitting a project for proofreading or review by more than one proofreader will result is unacceptable costs in terms of time and money.
Therefore, there is a need within the art of human language translations for an efficient, economical, reliable, and timely method of evaluating the quality and accuracy of the translation simultaneously by a group of professional translators. There is also a need for a system does not require the user (e.g. network translation service provider) to know: 1) the target language; 2) the reliability and accuracy of the human translator; and/or, 3) the reliability and accuracy of any one reviewer within a plurality of reviewers.
The present disclosure is based on a novel computer system, method, and media comprising the use of a plurality of translator reviewers (i.e. reviewers of the quality of a language translation) connected in real-time simultaneously via a computer network (e.g. the Internet) to review the translation and give their rating on its quality. Incompetent reviewers are easily and automatedly identified by the computer system and their quality rating removed when computing a consensus quality rating of the original translation.